The Impossible Coin (The Downwinders Book 2) by Michael Richan Page A

day. When he passed by Jeanette’s he saw that she’d
gone back inside, and he was grateful not to have to interact with her again.
Once he reached his trailer, he went in and began rummaging for food.
    His mother emerged from the back
bedroom, now dressed in a tank top and cut offs. She’d had her morning doses of
caffeine and nicotine, and she was ready to face the world.
    “There’s no food in here to make
sandwiches with,” Winn complained. “We’re out of peanut butter.”
    “There’s cheese,” his mother said.
“Make a cheese sandwich.”
    “That’s gross,” Winn said.
    “You eat grilled cheese
sandwiches, what’s the difference?” she asked.
    “Uh, grilled?”
    “Well, you can grill a sandwich as
easily as I can,” she said. “So don’t tell me there’s no food. And by the way,
your gay little friend came around this morning, banging on the door, waking me
up. I want you to tell him to not knock on our door so early in the morning.”
    He knew she was talking about
Brent. It pissed him off when she called him ‘gay,’ because he knew she was
doing it to just to get a rise out of him.
    “Will you stop calling him gay?”
Winn said, putting two pieces of bread in the toaster.
    “That kid’ll be a real knob jockey
someday, mark my words,” she said, sitting down and clicking on the TV.
    “I don’t care, he’s my friend,”
Winn said, pulling butter out of the fridge. “And he’s a better person than
most of the men you bring home.”
    Winn saw her shoot him a glance,
but she didn’t reply. They both knew it was true.
    He buttered his toast and
sprinkled sugar and cinnamon on them, then sat with her as she watched an infomercial
selling a flat piece of metal that melted ice.
    “You don’t normally wear those
shoes,” she said, observing his feet.
    “Gotta clean the other ones, I got
them dirty with…” He stopped himself. He was about to say ‘ghost blood,’ but he
knew it would send her into a fit.
    “With what?”
    “…with this really sticky mud. I’m
going to wash them off with the hose later.”
    “Don’t ruin them,” she said,
lighting up another cigarette. “Those shoes have got to last you all year.”
    Winn had tried to talk to his
mother about his gift, his ability to enter the River, when he first discovered
it last year. She seemed to know what he was talking about, but she wouldn’t go
into details with him, and the more he brought it up, the more she shut him
down. That’s when he learned that Marty knew about the River, and was willing
to answer his questions about it. Marty explained that it was inherited. Winn
figured it came from his mom, but for some reason she wasn’t willing to tell
him about it.
    Winn brought it up with her once
since that initial encounter, and it hadn’t gone well. She got angry and told
him to never bring it up again. He hadn’t, with her. Whenever he had a question
about it, he went to Marty.
    Part of him wished his mom would
open up to him about it, but he knew that was unlikely. She was always distant.
When he saw how other moms treated their kids, he was surprised at how involved
they were, how they pestered his friends always wanting to know where they
were, what they were doing, and who they were doing it with. Winn’s mom never
asked those questions. She didn’t seem to care.
     “I got another early shift today,
I’m covering for Michelle again, so I won’t be home until after two,” she said,
tapping her cigarette ash into a ceramic ashtray, so full of ashes and butts
you couldn’t see the picture of Saddleback Mountain on the bottom. “You know
the drill.”
    “Yeah,” Winn said. “I know the
drill.”
    The drill meant three things:
keeping noise in the trailer down to a reasonable level so neighbors wouldn’t
complain (like they had a month ago, when someone had called the cops because
he was playing music too loud), being inside by ten, and lights out by
midnight. She claimed she had spies in the